A good 99.9% of the time, the only BG that pops at 19 is WSG. Every few months, we may play some AB’s during the CTA, but it is a rarity, and has not been seen in a while. Being that we do not have mounts in this bracket, AB is really just a lot of running around. Wargame arenas happen as well, especially on Bleeding Hollow, and Blizzard has said that they are going to bring skirmishes back in a later patch.

Queue times are picking up lately, and given the high quality of many games, they are quite tolerable. Games typically pop between roughly 6pm est and 1am est. Depending on the day, they sometimes start earlier and run later.

If you wish to queue in to exp-off 19s BG’s, you must manually stop yourself from gaining experience by seeing your faction’s respective ‘experience eliminator’ NPC in Stormwind or Orgrimmar. If you have any questions regarding this, please do not hesitate to ask.

+Gear+

In the 19s bracket, gear comes in the form of dungeon boss loot, satchel rewards from dungeons, BoA heirlooms, quest items, and PvP items from the WSG quartermaster. This breakdown varies considerably from class to class, even from spec to spec. I have several recommendations, in case you are trying to figure out the best in slot gear for your character. For one, you can go to wowhead and filter items by slot, and then put them in to a profile at chardev.com. Another idea is to go over to twinkinfo.com and find the 15-19 forum, then look at the armory thread for ideas on how to gear your character. A sticky is also there listing scaled down stats for enchants. Lastly, you can always ask for advice in this thread. For you old-timers coming back, AGM is not important like it used to be, so do not let that be a deterrant.

+Professions+

You can raise your gathering professions to 225 in this bracket, and your crafting professions to 150. For almost all specs, herbalism is pretty amazing, since all that haste rating translates to a huge percent at level 19. Many people, especially DPSers, also level skinning – its 9 crit rating comes out almost exactly to 3% in our bracket. Less popular is mining, which gives 7 stamina. Other than the gathering professions, there are those who level engineering for the use of bombs. Unfortunately, grenades are not available yet in our bracket, but gnomes get an extra 15 engineering skill and can make instant-cast mortars. The most common combination of professions that you will see in this bracket is herbalism and skinning.